Singapore’s best hawker food stalls, serving up laksa, char kway teow, curry puffs and more
- Hawker centres are a way of life for people in the Lion City, housing rows of stalls selling cheap and delicious food from Southeast Asia
- From breakfast to lunch, the Post’s food editor Susan Jung spent time eating her way through the city’s best offerings
In Singapore, the hawker centres are inextricably woven into the everyday life of its citizens. Everyone goes there – rich and poor alike.
Many of the housing estates in the Lion City have several cooked food stalls (as well as shops selling meats, seafood, produce and everyday goods) on the ground floor, while the larger hawker centres, in wide, low-rise buildings, are crammed with aisles of individual shops.
At around 8am, as we walk into the Hong Lim Food Centre (531A Upper Cross Street), my stomach is growling and my head is swivelling as I look at the wealth of stands serving up some of my favourite dishes.
It’s overwhelming because I want to eat everything, but fortunately, I have two great guides: my fellow academy chair for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Evelyn Chen, and her husband, Alex.
Both are native Singaporeans and are well practised with the hawker centre drill: they plonk down several of our group at a table to prevent it from being stolen by interlopers, split up to order from different stands, then get us coffee and other drinks for us to sip on while the food is being cooked.